Funds awarded for Stroke Prevention Unit

A university neurologist ihas been awarded funds by the Medical Research Council (MRC) and the Stroke Association to establish a Stroke Prevention Unit, which will study risk factors and preventive treatments for stroke and provide a `rapid assessment' clinic to which local GPs can refer high-risk patients. Dr Peter Rothwell has been appointed as an MRC Senior Clinical Fellow at the Department of Clinical Neurology, becoming the first independently funded senior clinical researcher in stroke in the UK. He will collaborate with other university departments to establish a multidisciplinary stroke prevention research group, combining expertise in clinical trials, epidemiology, genetics, and brain imaging. Stroke is a major health problem in the UK, with a total of 125,000 occuring each year—one every five minutes. It accounts for over £2.3 billion of healthcare spending every year, and is the third most common cause of death in the UK, behind heart disease and cancer. In addition, it is the leading cause of disability in the population, leaving 50 per cent of patients significantly disabled. As the population ages, it is estimated that the number of strokes will double on a world scale within the next twenty years, particularly in underdeveloped countries. The Stroke Prevention Unit will seek to improve the effectiveness of existing preventive treatments by targeting individuals most likely to benefit from them, and will assess potential new treatments in clinical trials. It will also co-ordinate several international studies into risk factors for stroke, trials of preventive treatments, and trials of the effectiveness of vascular surgical intervention. Studies of genetic determinants of stroke risk are also planned. Establishment of the Unit in Oxford is particularly significant, because it offers the opportunity for researchers to set up a second Oxfordshire Community Stroke Project, following the first project carried out in Oxfordshire in the early 1980s. The twenty-year time period between the two studies will afford the only real opportunity in the UK to determine recent time trends in stroke incidence and assess whether health education and existing preventive treatments have had any significant effect. Dr Rothwell said: `Research funding for stroke in the UK is less than 10 per cent of that provided for either heart disease or cancer, despite the fact that the clinical and finan-cial burdens are similar. One of our immediate challenges is to convince the funding agencies of the high cost of not doing stroke research.'